Carol's Comments October 2022

 

Carol’s Comments October 2022

Hello Everyone! Welcome to another issue of Carol’s Comments. I’ve always loved literary traveling to all my favorite places and time periods. This summer, I began my journey in the Italian Riviera while watching Hotel Portofino, the delightful and sumptuous new ITV British miniseries written and created by Matt Baker on PBS. I soon discovered that the program also had a companion novel written by J.P. O’Connell. I quickly checked it out of the library.

 

Set in 1926, O’Connell’s  luscious historical novel concentrates on a British aristocratic family, Bella and Cecil Ainsworth and their two grown children- Alice and Lucien- who open a luxury hotel in the Italian Riviera during Mussolini’s reign. Their daughter Alice is a widow raising a young daughter after her husband dies in World War I while their artist son Lucien still suffers the traumatic physical and psychological wounds from the Great War.

The Ainsworths hope to arrange a marriage between Lucien and Cecil’s former sweetheart’s daughter Rose but Lucien’s secret dalliance with the hotel’s maid Paola and his homoerotic attraction to his best friend Nish, an Indian doctor who saved his life in France create tremendous obstacles to this plan.

Moreover, all the hotel’s guests along with its owners are guarding many lurid secrets which creates lots of intrigue along with some confusion for the reader. The book’s rather provocative themes, overlooked and downplayed in the television series reminded me of a combination between Downton Abbey and The Durrells in Corfu with a small sprinkle of an Agatha Christie or Jessica Fellowes mystery.

Hotel Portofino, the novel as well as the miniseries has a very open-ended conclusion. It seems like there may be many more adventures ahead for Bella Ainsworth and her family as well as former and future guests. I hope so!

Despite its lightweight and somewhat predictable plot, Hotel Portofino is the perfectly delicious summer reading guilty pleasure.

 

While browsing The New York Times Bestseller List, I noticed that Kim Michele Richardson had recently published The Book Woman’s Daughter, a sequel to The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, one of my favorite novels. I hurriedly placed a hold on it. Unfortunately, I had to wait several weeks before I could read it. When the library finally notified me that copy was available, I quickly picked it up at the River Park Branch. It was well worth the wait.

Set in 1953 Kentucky, Richardson’s new novel focuses on Cussy Mary’s teenage daughter Honey Lovett who narrates the book. At sixteen, her parents are arrested for breaking miscegenation laws when a stranger reports a “Blue” woman is married to a white man. The Lovett family had been living secretly in Thousandsticks, Kentucky for twelve years. Fortunately, when Honey reached adolescence ,she lost the blue skin color from the genetic disorder methemoglobinemia and now only turns blue on her hands and feet when she is afraid or excited.

To protect Honey from going to the House of Reform, a children’s prison where she would be confined for five years until she turns 21, her parents ask their lawyer to appoint their trusted friend Loretta Adams to act as her guardian.

When Loretta suddenly dies and her nephew sells his old aunt’s house to pay his debts, Honey returns to her grandparents’ home deep in the hollow hoping to hide from the authorities until she turns 18 in sixteen months. Honey realizes she needs a job to support herself. After much thought, she applies for the Assistant Packhorse Outreach Librarian position. When other applicants drop out, she gets hired!

Now just like her mother years ago, she and her mother’s old mule Junia, deliver books and other reading material to people living in rural Kentucky. With her tremendous fighting spirit, Honey Lovett not only helps her patrons by giving them hope, solace and escape through the books she brings them but these books also allow Honey to gain emancipation and live independently as a legal adult.

Throughout the sequel, Richardson extensively describes events from the first novel so it can be read as a separate book for readers who haven’t read the original story. The author also profiles other courageous Appalachian women like forest lookouts, visiting nurses and coal miners by including authentic photos of these trailblazers in a special section at the end of the book.

The novel’s incredibly enthralling narrative was so riveting and addictive, I couldn’t stop reading. I finished it in less than a week! The Book Woman’s Daughter is a wonderful and amazing book. I highly recommend it to both adult and young adult readers who enjoy historical fiction or novels about libraries.

 

After finishing The Book Woman’s Daughter, the library’s online catalog suggested I might enjoy reading The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher. When I learned that Maher’s new historical novel focused on expatriate authors and artists in 1920s Paris – a subject I absolutely adore, I quickly snatched up a copy.

Set in Paris between 1917-1936, Maher’s novel centers on Sylvia Beach, the founder of the famous bookstore and lending library Shakespeare and Company. Unsure of her true sexuality and very unconventional for her time, Sylvia decides in 1917 that Paris is the perfect place to live a bohemian life as a potential writer. Then by 1920 at age 30, she decides to open Shakespeare and Company, the first American bookstore in Paris after she meets and begins a discreet yet very passionate lesbian relationship with Adrienne Monnier.

Sylvia becomes very good friends with James Joyce and loves all his novels especially his current very controversial book Ulysses. When the United States declares it obscene and bans its publication under the Sedition Acts, Sylvia decides to defy this outrageous censorship and publishes Ulysses under the Shakespeare and Company’s imprint on Joyce’s birthday, February 2, 1922. This was the only book Shakespeare and Company would ever publish. Beach later relinquishes her rights to the novel when Random House under Bennett Cerf finally published it in the United States in 1952.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Shakespeare and Company became a literary haven for many other writers in the expatriate community such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller and especially Ernest Hemingway. Chapters about Hemingway’s visits to the bookstore alone or particularly with his first wife Hadley Hemingway strangely mirror Paula McLain’s novel The Paris Wife, now seen through Sylvia Beach’s perspective.

Maher also features a fascinating Author’s Note chapter that vividly describes Beach’s remarkable life after the novel ends in 1936. I highly recommend The Paris Bookseller for readers who enjoy historical and biographical fiction especially set in Paris between the two world wars.

The books reviewed in this blog can be found in most local public libraries. My readers in St. Joseph County, Indiana can visit the St. Joseph County Public Library’s web site at sjcpl.org for additional information.

Thanks for reading! See you all next time.

 

 

 

Carol's Comments June 2022

Carol’s Comments June 2022

 

Hello Everyone! Welcome back to another issue of Carol’s Comments. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I’ve written and posted a blog for this column. I’ve been regularly searching for new books in all my regular review sources like The New York Times Book Review, but I haven’t found the perfect collection of imaginative and thought-provoking books that would thoroughly delight and entertain my loyal and devoted readers.

 

Now that the pandemic has eased somewhat, I knew I needed to visit the library in person to discover the perfect hidden gems awaiting there. So one day this Spring while browsing through the current periodicals section to find a suitable replacement for Martha Stewart Living which had unfortunately ceased publication with the May 2022 issue, I spotted Nick, a new novel by Michael Farris Smith on display at the end of the regular fiction shelves. I snatched it up immediately.

Farris Smith’s fascinating re-imagined prequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby centers on the backstory of Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator. The novel realistically depicts Carraway’s horrific experiences he endures and witnesses as a soldier during World War I and how these traumatic events affect his life and relationships after he returns to America.

The story has a stream of consciousness tone that shifts around from past to present as Nick reminisces about his life before the war growing up in Minnesota as well as his doomed romance with his lover Ella in Paris. This nonlinear prose style, though confusing at times, works well to show how tragic and dramatic circumstances of modern warfare ultimately destroyed the optimism and idealism of the Lost Generation.

When Carraway leaves Paris, he doesn’t immediately return to his childhood home in Minnesota, After a brief stop in Chicago, he heads instead to New Orleans for several months leading a dissipated life of danger and corruption. Although he does return briefly to his parents’ Midwest home, Nick feels completely disillusioned there. Upon a friend’s suggestion, he travels to New York where he rents a cottage in West Egg, Long Island for the summer. Farris Smith’s compelling novel goes full circle, ending where Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby begins. Despite its flaws and inconsistent plot development, Nick is an imaginative prequel to The Great Gatsby.

After finishing Nick, the library’s online catalog suggested I might enjoy Love and Ruin, Paula McLain’s 2018 novel focusing on Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. The book sounded very intriguing because I previously read and reviewed her earlier novel The Paris Wife for this blog in 2012. I quickly put a hold on it.

 

Love and Ruin begins in 1936 when fledgling author and journalist Gellhorn returns from Europe to her hometown St. Louis when he father becomes ill and later dies. Gellhorn, a very independent young woman longing for adventure, yearns to travel to Spain and write about the brutal civil war between Franco’s Nationalists and the democratically elected Republican government. But before going there, she heads to Florida with her mother and brother Alfred where they accidentally meet Ernest Hemingway in a Key West bar. That casual encounter would dramatically alter Gellhorn’s destiny forever.

Hemingway soon encourages Martha to meet him in New York and travel with him to Spain to report about the Republican forces struggle to defeat Franco’s
Nationalist efforts to impose a Fascist regime. She eagerly accepts his offer.

But first Gellhorn needs to obtain official press credentials to work as a legitimate war correspondent. Through support of a colleague, she receives the proper press credentials to act as special correspondent for Collier’s Magazine.

When Hemingway and Gellhorn first arrive in Spain, he acts strictly as a friend and mentor to her. But as the Civil War accelerates and its violence and destruction literally fuel their passions,they soon become lovers especially after the heavy bombing in Madrid.

McLain’s incredible book gives a very realistic portrait of the Spanish Civil War’s devastation and how its volatility not only leads to the couple’s insatiable sexual relationship but later it became the inspiration for Hemingway’s greatest masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls published in 1940.

After leaving Spain, Martha goes to Cuba to live with Hemingway. There she buys a house for them outside of Havana and tries to write her own novel. Still not married to Hemingway at the beginning of World War II, Gellhorn accepts an assignment for Collier’s Magazine to cover the tenuous situation in Finland in November 1939- her first journalist assignment since the Spanish Civil War.

Then later after much persistence and patience, Gellhorn finally marries Hemingway on November 21, 1940. Unfortunately, her stubbornness to stay independent by putting her career before her romantic relationship with Hemingway would eventually doom their marriage when it finally collapses in June 1944. Ironically, her war correspondent career soars because she was the first journalist- and only woman – to witness and report about the D Day invasion by Allied forces on June 6, 1944.

McLain’s engrossing novel was so intoxicating I couldn’t stop reading it. Love and Ruin is the perfect companion to The Paris Wife. I highly recommend it to readers who enjoy historical or biographical fiction.

 

I’ve always been a big movie fan especially classic films from the 1930s through the 1970s. Turner Classic Movies has offered me many hours of comfort, pleasure and escape from everyday life, particularly over the last 2 ½ years.  So when I saw a positive review in The New York Times about Stephen Galloway’s new biography Truly, Madly; Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century, I knew I needed to read it.

Galloway’s well researched, detailed and insightful book chronicles the tumultuous romance between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Their love affair began during the filming of Fire Over England in 1937. Olivier and Leigh soon left their spouses and started living together. They finally married in 1940 after Olivier divorced wife Jill Esmond.

The highlights of Galloway’s fascinating book are the chapters centering on Olivier’s and Leigh’s unhappy and unusual childhoods, the making of Gone With the Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire – the two films where Leigh won Best Actress Oscars in 1940 and 1952 respectively and Olivier’s strained relationship with Marilyn Monroe during the production of The Prince and the Showgirl.

But the most heartbreaking portion of the book are the chapters describing Vivien Leigh’s bipolar disorder (aka manic depression) that ultimately destroyed her career, her marriage to Olivier (he divorced her in 1961 to marry actress Joan Plowright) and contributed to her death from tuberculosis at age 53 in 1967.

Galloway offers a very unique and compassionate perspective on Leigh’s mental illness by consulting with modern medical experts about the devastating effects of bipolar disorder especially during the time before current treatments and medications were available. The last few chapters concentrating on Leigh’s remaining years are especially poignant.

Truly, Madly is definitely a must-read for all classic movie fans. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The books reviewed in this blog can be found in most local public libraries. My readers in St. Joseph County, Indiana can visit the St. Joseph County Public Library’s web site at www.sjcpl.org for further information.

After much thought over the past year, I’ve decided to continue writing Carol’s Comments! Instead of posting it quarterly as I’ve tried to do since 2011, I’m now planning to post two issues per year. I really love writing this blog and sharing my thoughts about books and movies with all of you. Carol’s Comments means a lot to me and I didn’t want to discontinue it.

Thanks for reading! See you all next time.